The English painter Bonington traveled to Italy for the first time in the spring of 1826. This is one of the first paintings he produced while there, on or about April 11. His traveling companion wrote that “We are in Milan, where at last we have unpacked and put to use our color boxes.

Bonington was one of the most supremely gifted landscape painters Britain has produced, comparable in artistic stature to J. M. W. Turner and John Constable but less familiar because he died young and left a comparatively small body of works, most on a modest scale.